A Distant Beacon was set up in 2001 to publish re:VOX, an Ultravox (and related artists) magazine. Since then I've become involved in a number of other projects, some of which are directly related to A Distant Beacon, some of which not so much. The aim of this blog is to bring all my various activities under one (electronic) roof!

I’d seen a few of the
Charlie Brown specials during the 1970s, in all their grainy, over-played
glory, but it wasn’t until the advent of ‘Breakfast TV’ in the UK in the
mid-1980s that I would have the chance to video almost all of the early
specials, to enjoy them again at leisure, as I’m sure many Stateside fans will
also have done in the days before home video releases in stores were common
place. I even made up my own audio mix-tape of favourite cues (although I doubt
I’m the only one in the world to have done that either) – disruptive dialogue,
sound effects and all. Cue strange looks when that was played at work once!

A few years later I
chanced upon a review in Record Collector
of one of the first Vince Guaraldi CD releases by Fantasy, eagerly snapping up
the Trio’s first album and both of the CBS soundtrack albums. These were being
imported into the UK through Ace Records at the time, so they came complete
with their US long-box cardboard mounting cases (as pictured here), a method of
packaging which was later abandoned in the States.

But those two
soundtracks hardly scratched the surface of all the potential music which
Guaraldi had produced for the shows along with his various sidemen – if any of it
still existed, of course (especially from a British perspective of knowing how
poor many organisations had been in neglecting to archive their history). Fortunately,
we weren’t to be disappointed, it was just that the wait would be a long one.
And so it wasn’t until the unexpected release of Charlie Brown’s Holiday Hits in 1998 that it became clear that
there was indeed at least some new material still to be released. Disappointingly,
that seemed to be it. But then a saviour arose in the mid-Noughties, when
Guaraldi’s son David uncovered various recordings, in various states of repair,
and started to make this fresh material available; first through Bluebird
Records and then by resurrecting his father’s previously formed D&D record label.

By then DVD had
surmounted video as a much more versatile (pun fully intended) format for
adding additional supporting material to collections of archive TV and films,
thus making (what were also much slimmer) box-sets a much more-affordable
reality at last. Yet, even with the advent of DVD, there were still a good
handful of the first fifteen Charlie Brown specials that were frustratingly not
yet available, and those that were would sometimes be placed as extras on those
individual discs of later shows that were starting to be made available. It
wasn’t until relatively recently that we could finally view all fifteen
Guaraldi sound-tracked specials chronologically thanks to the excellent 1960
and the first two 1970s box sets.

You can blame
Derrick’s excellent book for what happened next! After a full Christmas 2015
devouring of Vince Guaraldi at the Piano,
many months after it had been purchased (and following one previous attempt to
find time to read it all the way through that had stalled after reading the
introduction and then getting too busy with other things to continue with it),
I was suitably inspired to complete the long-planned purchase of just about all
the Guaraldi CDs I’d been intending to buy but hadn’t got around to yet, and a
few others besides. It was then that I looked back at the web-site, and one of
the Music Use Sheets for an episode caught my eye. I knew the first cue listed
there wasn’t right at all, as I could clearly recall that show starting with a
completely different track instead, one that could be found on the first Lost Cues CD. This got me thinking –
always a dangerous sign!

Suitably inspired, I then
decided to see if I could work out exactly where all the tracks on the CDs came
from, bearing in mind the helpful pointers provided on this website about
incorrectly named tracks on some of the compilation albums and the shows they
actually belonged to rather than what their booklet and sleeve notes might
otherwise say. The results threw up several major surprises, a few revisions to
information that had previously appeared on Five Cents Please, as well as some other seriously interesting
discoveries, all of which will I hope make it easier to see just what original
TV music is now out there on CD. As Derrick has mentioned on his latest blog entry, you'll now need to buy at least two more
albums than you previously expected to if you’ve only been purchasing those
that so obviously do contain TV music! Had I not had that mad buying spree to fill in the many gaps in my collection whilst everything was available, I'm sure I would never have attempted this when I did.

If you've got this far in, and if you're interested in how I approached this project, then read on.

It seems to me that
when these TV shows were originally being compiled, names were often given to
the cues as a means of describing their purpose, or as an indication of the
mood of a scene, rather than as the sort of firm title that they would have
automatically acquired if they’d been planned for commercial release at the
time. Because these titles weren’t fixed, as they would have been if they were
pop songs or other compositions, they are by no means consistent across all the
shows. So much so, that some of the more popular tunes that were re-recorded
over and over for each show they appeared – often in increasingly different
arrangements until they became almost unrecognisable – also went on to acquire
several different names too as time passed. Meanwhile, and muddying the waters
further, two completely different pieces of music in the same show turn out to
share exactly the same name.

Confusing, isn’t
it?!!

Although I’ve kept
closely to the style and terminology that was carefully set out for the
original on-line episode guides on this web-site, you’ll quickly see that I’ve narrowed
the focus here to concentrate on identifying where specific TV cues can be
found on CD, adding separate notation in blue typeindicating where other, later re-recordings of some of these cues can be found on CD that are not yet available on any Guaraldi album in
any of their on-screen TV variations.

As Derrick says
elsewhere on his web pages, whilst some of the TV soundtrack recordings that have escaped on to
CD can be heard in full within the original TV episode, this is by no means
always the case, and in many instances only selected segments of some
recordings are utilised within the final cut of the animated shows. In
addition, it’s become clear, in listening through all the TV shows, that most
episodes had several different versions of the same cues recorded, which came
in varying tempos, moods, arrangements and instrumentation (as we’ve heard from
the ‘alternate’ versions of familiar cues that keep slipping out on to CD every
few years). As you'll have seen, I’ve tried to reflect these variations by adding in some extra
descriptions of my own in an attempt to more clearly define these differing
versions, such as [brass version] or
[guitar version] for instance. Some
of the differences are very slight and require several listens to properly
identify, but most are much easier to spot.

It was only after
embarking on this project that I happened to wander over to his blog, only to discover that Doug Anderson had already helpfully worked his way through
the Christmas special, although using far more hi-tech methods than I have at
my disposal (but then I’ve spent many decades working in music identification,
picking out remixes and alternative versions of songs for other projects, so I
have certain methods that I use too). Strangely enough, I’d also marked up the
cue sheets by the time positions that they appear on the DVDs. The only
difference you’ll find between what Doug set down, and what I’ve assembled
here, is that I’ve split some of the cues up further, as to my ears some of
them are actually individual tracks separated by the tiniest of gaps.

On the spreadsheets I appended to my previous post I’ve highlighted rows in bold
type on the TV episodes guide to make it easier to see those cues that can be
found on CD, with a note guiding you to the album it appears on, along with its
track number. I’ve done the same thing over on the CD album guide to indicate which
tracks on each album featured as a cue in an actual TV episode (noting its
position within that show by the cue numbers I’ve assigned to each episode). In
the final column at the end of each row I’ve added various notes about the
music – a mixture of previous posted information and some new additions. But beyond
what’s already been posted about some of the tracks, you’ll also find a few
suggested corrections in green type where things
are not quite what they initially seemed to be.

Thus, after a six
month period of comparing the soundtracks to the specials alongside the
material scattered across various CDs, swapping headphones between the DVD and
the CD players to play and replay the music to run full A/B comparisons, this is what I’ve come up with so far. Oh, and I also took a brief side-trip in to
classical-land while I was delving deeper into the TV shows, and managed to
lock-down both the precise details of those classical tracks that were
documented previously on the original Music Use Sheets compiled for each
episode, but I’m pleased to say that I have also managed to identify a few of
the other classical works about which there were no details at all, although by
no means all – at least one cue of which has unfortunately escaped identification as yet.

But let’s hope this
isn’t the final word on this. One can only hope that there’s yet more material waiting
somewhere to be discovered and released. It would be great to fill in some more
blanks. As it presently stands some specials still sadly remain entirely
unrepresented on CD. If I hadn’t already thought so before I started this, a
chronological box set of Guaraldi’s music for the Charlie Brown TV specials is now
definitely long overdue, although it would be a herculean task to compile,
especially with material scattered amongst various archives at present.
Nevertheless, I’d love to help trying to identify any material that did surface, as I
know others would be too. The fact that Fantasy keeps dipping into Guaraldi’s
catalogue convinces me that if a wider audience could be reached then a
full-blown collector’s set would be a worthy project. If this research helps in
any way to further that possibility, then all the better, but I’m just happy to
have finally got to grips with what’s already out there, hence my desire to get
this information out to as many of Guaraldi’s admirers as possible.

Happiness is…
listening to more Vince!P.S. In answer to this article's title - referencing one particular TV music cue - the answer is Brown!

3 comments:

Wow! Thanks Rob for undertaking such a big project so expertly! (And also for the kind shout-out for my own, more limited efforts.) Derrick had told me I'd appreciate and enjoy "geeking out" with your work, but my job and offline life had kept me from giving it a serious look until now. He was right (as he usually is), and I'm really looking forward to digging in to each of your cue sheets! Thanks for this labor of love.

About Me

A busy designer and writer, for the past two decades Rob's been researching an in-depth book on Marvel UK, and since 2001 has also been running re:VOX, a magazine concerning everything to do with the group Ultravox.